It's an old lesson, but one we must re-learn every now and then.
Recently I began to suffer from "gamemaster withdrawal" after half a year or so without running any roleplaying campaigns. I was bursting with ideas for games, so finally I sent out a call for interested players, and drew up a "prospectus" of games I'd like to run. The idea was that the players could vote on which campaign appealed to them.
I kept it simple. The prospectus had six campaigns on it:
- "Unknown Stars" — a classic Traveller game of mercantile exploration in a newly-reopened subsector,
- "Beyond Tomorrow" — a D20-based "Gamma World"-style campaign of space voyagers returning to a devastated far-future Earth,
- "Against All Flags" — a more-or-less straight historical pirate game set in 1714,
- "SHIELD Stories" — a game of doughty SHIELD agents in a world of superheroes (essentially my version of the Agents of SHIELD TV show),
- "Lost Decade" — a Call of Cthulhu campaign about characters who have all just recovered from amnesia and must find out what they were doing over the past ten years, and
- "A Billion Worlds" — I kind of just threw this one in on a whim, a campaign using a fictional far-future hard SF setting I've been developing for a fiction project.
Most of them were pretty low-effort. The simplest would be the pirate game, since my own knowledge of the world in 1714 is good enough to let them just sail around and bump into people.
The SHIELD campaign was almost as easy, especially since I intended to let my players occasionally take the roles of the mysterious "Steering Committee" setting objectives and priorities for the agency's operations. Their decisions would determine what kind of missions Col. Fury would hand out to their agent characters. All I needed was access to a couple of Marvel Comics fan wiki sites, and forty years of reading comic books.
The Traveller campaign and "Beyond Tomorrow" needed a little more preparation, but they were confined to fairly limited areas so I could generate some worlds or places for the party to explore, and expand only as needed.
The Call of Cthulhu game needed a bit more preparation, but I had not only a lot of existing support material for the game, but also H.P. Lovecraft's entire corpus to steal from.
So, no matter what game my players picked, I could run it without a lot of effort. Easy-peasy.
Guess which one came out first in the vote? That's right — my unlikely dark horse candidate, "A Billion Worlds." For that one I have to come up with dozens of intelligent species and subspecies inhabiting a billion artificial habitats, asteroids, terraformed moons, and planets, with eight thousand years of history to invent.
Now, fortunately, I have to do most of that anyway for the new novel I'm working on. So the roleplaying game and the science fiction project can borrow from each other.
Maybe this is for the best, really. Low-effort campaigns don't test my powers at all. The Billion Worlds won't be easy, but I doubt I'll get bored with it.
I've always wanted a big setting with tons of species, like Sector General or the Legion of Super-Heroes. That probably would have been my choice too, although you don't really mention here what the PC's place in the setting is.
Posted by: Chuk | 04/10/2019 at 05:15 PM